1. Field of Invention
The field of the present invention relates in general to wireless local area networks (WLAN) including wireless access points (WAP) and wireless stations and methods for traffic management of same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Home and office networks, a.k.a. wireless local area networks (WLAN) are established and serviced using a device called a Wireless Access Point (WAP). The WAP may include a router. The WAP wirelessly couples all the devices of the home network, e.g. wireless stations such as: computers, printers, televisions, digital video (DVD) players, security cameras and smoke detectors to one another and to the Cable or Subscriber Line through which Internet, video, and television is delivered to the home. Most WAPs implement the IEEE 802.11 standard which is a contention based standard for handling communications among multiple competing devices for a shared wireless communication medium on a selected one of a plurality of communication channels. The frequency range of each communication channel is specified in the corresponding one of the IEEE 802.11 protocols being implemented, e.g. “a”, “b”, “g”, “n”, “ac”, “ad”, “ax”. Communications follow a hub and spoke model with a WAP at the hub and the spokes corresponding to the wireless links to each ‘client’ device.
After selection of a single communication channel for the associated home network, access to the shared communication channel relies on a multiple access methodology identified as Collision Sense Multiple Access (CSMA). CSMA is a distributed random access methodology first introduced for home wired networks such as Ethernet for sharing a single communication medium, by having a contending communication link back off and retry access to the line if a collision is detected, i.e. if the wireless medium is in use.
Communications on the single communication medium are identified as “simplex” meaning, one communication stream from a single source node to one or more target nodes at one time, with all remaining nodes capable of “listening” to the subject transmission. To confirm arrival of each communication packet, the target node is required to send back an acknowledgment, a.k.a. “ACK” packet to the source. Absent the receipt of the ACK packet the source will retransmit the unacknowledged data until an acknowledgement is received, or a time-out is reached.
To support the advent of streaming video over a wireless network, the Wireless Multi Media (WMM) and IEEE 802.11e standards added prioritization of traffic based on content type to allow real time audio and video traffic higher priority access to the contention based WLAN than the priority accorded to non real time data, such as a file transfer, e.g. File Transfer Protocol (FTP). The prioritization was achieved by creating different content queues for audio, video and data communication traffic. The higher priority content queues have smaller fixed backoff times and larger maximum packet size limits as established by the IEEE 802.11e standard. The higher priority content queues are said to assure a higher Quality of Service (QOS) for their associated audio or video queues.
What is needed is an improved method of traffic management on a residential or business WLAN.